Friday, August 31, 2012

My uncle Mathew was a real man. What that meant in my family was: he worked, he brought home his pay, he could fix things and make things, and was afraid of nothing. He was also handsome and manly; he had dark eyes like Greek olives, brown skin, white teeth, and a fascinating, dangerous-sounding history. He had an accent, too, and my Aunt Celia liked to say of her sister Lillie, who had been a spinster and, as far as we knew, a virgin, till she married him, "Vy'd she hef to pick a forriner?" Mathew, or Mateos, Georgiou, born in Cyprus, married Lillie, born in Orsha, Russia when they were both in their forties. Once he told me that she used to dance for him -- this was long before she died, and Mathew, a chef, had sold his knives to pay the hospital bills -- bare-breasted. How she must have loved him, and he, her.Mathew had run away from Cyprus as a teen-ager, run away from the British, who, he said, had stolenhis family's land, and during the War he joined the Army, where they taught him to cook American style. He knew Greek cooking, and somehow learned how to cook kosher specialities, so in the summers he worked the big Catskill hotels, and in the winter, Florida. He loved the sun, and Lillie did too; their life, which must have been so hard and lonely before they found each other, became a kind of long vacation. No wonder she danced!When Lillie got sick the doctors lied to her about what was wrong, but she came from a family where her mother died at thirty-four, and her father in his forties, so she was pretty sure she knew. She and Mathew were living in New York then, and so was I, a newly-wed. On one of the days when she'd had her appointment at Mount Sinai, she called and asked me to have lunch with her. We met in a Chinese restaurant, and when the meal was finished, she took money out of her purse and said she was celebrating. She had overheard the doctors talking about her. "I used to stay awake nights wondering if I had cancer ," she said. "Now I can sleep." Shortly after that she went into the hospital, suffered every awful thing they could do to her, and died a bad and difficult death.My Uncle Mathew, who was not my uncle at all, stayed in close touch with me all his life, partly, I think, because I was a witness to the happiness he had had with Lillie. He married again, a woman who adored him, fathered three beautiful black-eyed girls, cooked, danced, laughed, fed everyone, tended a garden full of figs and lemons and olive trees, and lived to be almost a hundred.

To this day, I can't eat in a Greek restaurant without thinking of Uncle Mathew, and how Aunt Lillie danced for him.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

I remember my fat Aunt Celia running down Clinton Place to hide at my mother’s house because Staten Island’s one kosher butcher had been somehow unmasked as trafedickeh, and a fraud -- Aunt Celia, who was fearless, who had hidden in haystacks as a child and saw the Cossacks cut off women's breasts and throw babies in the air to catch them on their swords, Aunt Celia, who could pickle herrings and cucumbers and green tomatos in brine you could float an egg on, and ferment, fry, boil, bake, make slivovits and cherry brandy that burned your throat and kept forever, twist the braid on a challah and make it shine, and shamed us all in her zeal to live as a blameless Jewish woman who kept the laws of kashruth in a strange land -- this Aunt Celia secretly bought her meat in the A and P and told her husband, Uncle Abe, that it was kosher, and ran now to her non-kosher sister-in-law, my mother, from whom she often cadged a ham sandwich and pretended that she didn’t quite know what it was, seeking solace and sanctuary, for she was about to be unmasked!

Yes, food was the drama and the joy of my childhood, food was my soft, chewy mother and my gristly, tough father, and my annoying little sister who was always there when you didn’t want her, like the strings of meat between your teeth.Why shouldn’t I write about that, then, while I’m waiting for this agent or that agent to stop telling me yes, I can write (“I loved your book, I really did. I read it to the last page – but I can’t sell it. In fact, I no longer represent fiction.”)? I daren’t say anything about the state of publishing, or how worried I am that books in covers, which is the definition of books in my world, are already lost to the cold breezes of the internet, and instead turn to something that is still the consuming – and that’s not a pun – pleasure of my life: great food.

I even like not-so-great food on occasion, as everybody does, if they confessed it. That same Aunt Celia wouldn’t take the time, or maybe couldn’t afford to make real blintzes with sour cream and butter and powdered sugar and cherry jam, so she dipped sandwiches of plain pot cheese and Uneeda biscuits into beaten eggs, fried them in fat and sprinkled them with cinnamon. They were delicious.

So maybe I could write about my Aunt Celia, and my mother, who was a prodigious cook, so prodigious that nobody ever invited us to dinner, only came to our house to sample her roast beef and pork chops with sauerkraut and chicken and rice -- oh, and her potato salad. If there's a heaven and I ever get there, I'm going to ask for that potato salad! And I could write about my Uncle Mathew, my Greek uncle who would bring halumi cheese in one pocket and stuffed cabbage in the other -- in suitable containers of course -- and who taught me to eat sheep's head including brains and eyes, and lots of other things. It was an eating family, never rich, but never hungry.